Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

Chapter 37

A word about the sleeping accommodation open to a homeless person in London. At present it is
impossible to get a BED in any non-charitable institution in London for less than sevenpence a night. If you cannot
afford seven-pence for a bed, you must put up with one of the following substitutes:

1. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy gave me of sleeping on the Embankment:

‘De whole t’ing wid de Embankment is gettin’ to sleep early. You got to be on your bench by eight o’clock, because
dere ain’t too many benches and sometimes dey’re all taken. And you got to try to get to sleep at once. ‘Tis too cold
to sleep much after twelve o’clock, an’ de police turns you off at four in de mornin’. It ain’t easy to sleep, dough,
wid dem bloody trams flyin’ past your head all de time, an’ dem sky-signs across de river flickin’ on an’ off in your
eyes. De cold’s cruel. Dem as sleeps dere generally wraps demselves up in newspaper, but it don’t do much good. You’d
be bloody lucky if you got t’ree hours’ sleep.’

I have slept on the Embankment and found that it corresponded to Paddy’s description. It is, however, much better
than not sleeping at all, which is the alternative if you spend the night in the streets, elsewhere than on the
Embankment. According to the law in London, you may sit down for the night, but the police must move you on if they see
you asleep; the Embankment and one or two odd corners (there is one behind the Lyceum Theatre) are special exceptions.
This law is evidently a piece of wilful offensive-ness. Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from dying of
exposure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die of exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris
there is no such law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine bridges, and in doorways, and on benches in the
squares, and round the ventilating shafts of the Metro, and even inside the Metro stations. It does no apparent harm.
No one will spend a night in the street if he can possibly help it, and if he is going to stay out of doors he might as
well be allowed to sleep, if he can.

2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than the Embankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit
in a row on a bench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this as though leaning over a fence. A man,
humorously called the valet, cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been there myself, but Bozo had been
there often. I asked him whether anyone could possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it was more
comfortable than it sounded — at any rate, better than bare floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the charge
there is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead of twopence.

3. The Coffin, at fourpence a night. At the Coffin you sleep in a wooden box, with a tarpaulin for covering. It is
cold, and the worst thing about it are the bugs, which, being enclosed in a box, you cannot escape.

Above this come the common lodging-houses, with charges varying between sevenpence and one and a penny a night. The
best are the Rowton Houses, where the charge is a shilling, for which you get a cubicle to yourself, and the use of
excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a ‘special’, which is practically hotel accommodation. The
Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against
cooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the best advertisement for the Rowton Houses is the fact that they are always full
to overflowing. The Bruce Houses, at one and a penny, are also excellent.

Next best, in point of cleanliness, are the Salvation Army hostels, at sevenpence or eightpence. They vary (I have
been in one or two that were not very unlike common lodging-houses), but most of them are clean, and they have good
bathrooms; you have to pay extra for a bath, however. You can get a cubicle for a shilling. In the eightpenny
dormitories the beds are comfortable, but there are so many of them (as a rule at least forty to a room), and so close
together, that it is impossible to get a quiet night. The numerous restrictions stink of prison and charity. The
Salvation Army hostels would only appeal to people who put cleanliness before anything else.

Beyond this there are the ordinary common lodging-houses. Whether you pay sevenpence or a shilling, they are all
stuffy and noisy, and the beds are uniformly dirty and uncomfortable. What redeems them are their LAISSEZ-FAIRE
atmosphere and the warm home-like kitchens where one can lounge at all hours of the day or night. They are squalid
dens, but some kind of social life is possible in them. The women’s lodging-houses are said to be generally worse than
the men’s, and there are very few houses with accommodation for married couples. In fact, it is nothing out of the
common for a homeless man to sleep in one lodging-house and his wife in another.

At this moment at least fifteen thousand people in London are living in common lodging-houses. For an unattached man
earning two pounds a week, or less, a lodging-house is a great convenience. He could hardly get a furnished room so
cheaply, and the lodging-house gives him free firing, a bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society. As for the dirt, it
is a minor evil. The really bad fault of lodging-houses is that they are places in which one pays to sleep, and in
which sound sleep is impossible. All one gets for one’s money is a bed measuring five feet six by two feet six, with a
hard convex mattress and a pillow like a block of wood, covered by one cotton counterpane and two grey, stinking
sheets. In winter there are blankets, but never enough. And this bed is in a room where there are never less than five,
and sometimes fifty or sixty beds, a yard or two apart. Of course, no one can sleep soundly in such circumstances. The
only other places where people are herded like this are barracks and hospitals. In the public wards of a hospital no
one even hopes to sleep well. In barracks the soldiers are crowded, but they have good beds, and they are healthy; in a
common lodging-house nearly all the lodgers have chronic coughs, and a large number have bladder diseases which make
them get up at all the hours of the night. The result is a perpetual racket, making sleep impossible. So far as my
observation goes, no one in a lodging-house sleeps more than five hours a night — a damnable swindle when one has paid
sevenpence or more.

Here legislation could accomplish something. At present there is all manner of legislation by the L.C.C. about
lodging-houses, but it is not done in the interests of the lodgers. The L.C.C. only exert themselves to forbid
drinking, gambling, fighting, etc. etc. There is no law to say that the beds in a lodging-house must be comfortable.
This would be quite an easy thing to enforce — much easier, for instance, than restrictions upon gambling. The
lodging-house keepers should be compelled to provide adequate bedclothes and better mattresses, and above all to divide
their dormitories into cubicles. It does not matter how small a cubicle is, the important thing is that a man should be
alone when he sleeps. These few changes, strictly enforced, would make an enormous difference. It is not impossible to
make a lodging-house reasonably comfortable at the usual rates of payment. In the Groydon municipal lodging-house,
where the charge is only ninepence, there are cubicles, good beds, chairs (a very rare luxury in lodging-houses), and
kitchens above ground instead of in a cellar. There is no reason why every ninepenny lodging-house should not come up
to this standard.

Of course, the owners of lodging-houses would be opposed EN BLOC to any improvement, for their present business is
an immensely profitable one. The average house takes five or ten pounds a night, with no bad debts (credit being
strictly forbidden), and except for rent the expenses are small. Any improvement would mean less crowding, and hence
less profit. Still, the excellent municipal lodging-house at Croydon shows how well one CAN be served for ninepence. A
few well-directed laws could make these conditions general. If the authorities are going to concern themselves with
lodging-houses at all, they ought to start by making them more comfortable, not by silly restrictions that would never
be tolerated in a hotel.